The December Scrapbook—A Living Document

Recently, I've been thinking about in-context vs. out-of-context quotes. By now, I've read over two thousand books, easily, and devour at least a hundred per year. With more of a vocabulary and connections between authors, novels, works, etc,. I'm much more interdisciplinary about what I can draw between (and from.) It's a very satisfying ecosystem right now, actually; I often forget exactly how much I've read, and I love that everything's layering right now in such a resonant way.

In that same vein, I often run across fragments of books or quotes, and have thought about that concept in regards to my own book, since I'm such a line-level writer.

What's universal enough that someone might pull it out for their own use? What only makes sense in the context of the story? (There's a common complaint in book world nowadays about how everyone's just trying to make something quotable for a snappy video rather than something real, but that conversation's always been around in various formats—people have always written for pull-quotes.) What's misinterpreted by virtue of its separation?

Anyway, my algorithm and reading list have both been fantastic lately in spoonfeeding me quotes from books I want to add to my to-read list.

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I'm not sure what the collection says about me, but I'll gradually add pieces that strike my fancy. Of course, it's by no means exhaustive.

I've also considered doing a bell-exercise type practice (you know, like we did in grade school) of pulling a quote a day and writing about it in free association to exercise my creative muscles—or to build out even more of the WLS philosophy beyond reviews? So stay tuned. Maybe that'll be a daily 2025 goal.

Some Fragments I've Loved

In no particular order. And these don't necessarily indicate what I believe, just scraps that have sparked curiosity, sent me down a reading list, or otherwise piqued my interest for their prose or concept. You might find that I drift to certain writers too.

“I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside. — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood”

“May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the Universe, tiny but useful.—Mary Oliver”

“Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away—Louise Glück”

“Everything is nothing, with a twist.—Kurt Vonnegut”

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. —Simone Weil, Attention and Will”

“It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. — Joan Didion”

“I was always ashamed to take. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.—Anaïs Nin”

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.—Ursula K. Le Guin”

“I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. It's probably not even real.—Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves”

“How odd, I can have all this inside me and to you it's just words.—The Pale King, David Foster Wallace”

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.—Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow”

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? ...Well, think about it. Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.—John Steinbeck, East of Eden”

“When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.—Henry James, Beast in the Jungle”

“I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.—Kahlil Gibran, The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran”

“My life is not possible to tell. I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations. I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles. I weep when I find others play them for me. My real self is unknown. My work is merely an essence of this vast and deep adventure.—Anaïs Nin”

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.—Mary Oliver, Upstream”

“I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.—Richard Silken, Crush”

“Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.—Joyce Carol Oates, We Were the Mulvaneys”

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being”

“Studying him, I had time to realize I was scared of him. Spending time with him was like opening a window to get air. I didn't know why he chose me to share his blood with when we were kids. And I supposed that's what happens when someone who awes you also chooses to be insterested in you. You can't help but fear it, and you don't want to let it disappear, and you want to be enough to deserve it. I guessed that was a story as old as time.—Jodi Lynn Anderson, Each Night Is Illuminated”

“Finally, in a low whisper, he said, ‘I think I might be a terrible person.’ For a split second I believed him - I thought he was about to confess a crime, maybe a murder. Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before asking someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.—Miranda July, The First Bad Man”

“Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?—Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?”

“The emphasis, somehow, was on the word 'me.' That he didn't expect me to be able to stop doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.—Maggie Stiefvater, Sinner”

“You ever think you could cry so hard that there’d be nothing left in you, like how the wind shakes a tree in a storm until every part of it is run through with wind? I live in the low parts now, most days a little hazy with fever and waiting for the water to stop shivering out of the body. Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.—Ada Limón, After the Fire”

“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet”

“Sometimes, I think you get the worst of me. The much-loved loose forest green sweat pants, the long bra-less days, hair knotted and uncivilized, a shadowed brow where the devilish thoughts do their hoofed dance on the brain. I’d like to say this means I love you, the stained white cotton t-shirt, the tears, pistachio shells, the mess of orange peels on my desk, but it’s different than that. I move in this house with you, the way I move in my mind, unencumbered by beauty’s cage. I do like I do in the tall grass, more animal-me than much else. I’m wrong, it is that I love you, but it’s more that when you say it back, lights out, a cold wind through curtains, for maybe the first time in my life, I believe it.—Ada Limón, Love Poems with Apologies for My Appearance”

“He was kind to objects. With people he was a little afraid.—Emily Friedlund, History of Wolves”

“Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely.—Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude”

“In a world of scarcity, opportunities don't present themselves in bunches, and the decisions people face are between approach and avoidance, acceptance or rejection. We can assume that having a good sense of this—of what's good and what's bad—was essential for survival. But distinguishing between good and bad is a far simpler matter than distinguishing good from better from best.—Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice”

“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One's inner voices become inaudible. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.—Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things.”

“In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses”

“Valuing interior experience is vital to developing a sense of self, and how we reveal ourselves to the outside world has everything to do with how we stay out of view when we need to.—Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility In a Time of Transparency”

Of course, there are many other quotes I've loved this month amongst all the books I've read this month too, but you'll have to hunt through my latest reviews to find them. Gotta keep a little mystery!